


Pomegranates

by Iron



Category: Original Fiction - Fandom
Genre: F/M, female-focus, troubled kids in love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-13
Updated: 2015-06-13
Packaged: 2018-04-04 06:49:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 631
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4128780
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Iron/pseuds/Iron
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>The sunlight is a thick, sleepy gold hanging in the late evening air, heavy with the buzz of early summer insects. When Aisha breathes in she imagines even the air tastes yellow, like honey and maple syrup, even though all there really was is the faint fish and salt smell of the sea, wet concrete and rotting trash, and under that, if she concentrates, flowers and trees heavy with pollen.</i>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	Pomegranates

The sunlight is a thick, sleepy gold hanging in the late evening air, heavy with the buzz of early summer insects. When Aisha breathes in she imagines even the air tastes yellow, like honey and maple syrup, even though all there really was is the faint fish and salt smell of the sea, wet concrete and rotting trash, and under that, if she concentrates, flowers and trees heavy with pollen.

She’s pressed bare ankle to naked hip to the boy by her side, nose turned to her waist. He's curled up on himself, honest in sleep, head cushioned on the crook of his elbow and hair tangled around his face in silky black curls. In the fading light he looks as if made from lilies and rose petals, from the summer itself, a sprite or a spirit that she'd captured all for own. 

Hades and Persephone, Aisha remembers, the last inklings of a lesson school failed to teach her, King of the Underworld and Goddess of Spring. Her hand comes up to brush the curls from his forehead, the other pressed to his shoulder, and she thinks that the story fits, if only she could tell who was whom. 

He’d come to her in the melting, aching start of spring, with his sharp smile and broken-bottle eyes, wild as a redwood forest. Her graveyard dirt hands had swept him up with impish abandon, and they’d played their games like lovebird courtship, pain and pleasure and mischief. Did Alec trick her into loving him, sharp nails pressed to her neck and teeth to her ear, keeping her still until roots grew up around her feet? Could he, with his winter heart frozen heavy in his chest, love at all? Or did she trick him, twisting him all up around himself with hormones and kindness and all the things he'd never gotten to experience before, chase him until he lost himself to her jungle of metal and concrete, brick and dead dirt? 

In fall, she would have thought little of it. Life was for fun, for adventures, for running away when the mood took her and going home to her brother when it did not. Winter was for running wild and raising hell, burning everything down in her wake just because she could, eating snow and grinning toothy at the cops who would never be able to catch her, not as long as she ran the streets of her little kingdom. She’d ruled her little fiefdom with an iron fist, because she was the bitch and the queen and everyone knows you don’t challenge royalty. Everything had been gold, been silver and blood and snow, violence and pain. When had the winter faded from her bones? When had Alec begun leaving hand prints like fire on her skin? 

Now, the sun is just to setting, casting the world in copper and ruby light, edges of the sky just giving way to bruised purples and blues. She sits up, finally, but doesn't deign to pull on her shirt. Who's to see her, on the roof of a damned sky scraper? There's a basket and the remains of a poor man's lunch inside it to her left, but she's not hungry. Her hand returns to Alec's hair, threading fingers through it. He shuffles still closer to her, half asleep, pushes into her hand and murmurs something near to incomprehensible. One leg hooks into hers, pale against her dark, cool skin.

She tilts her head up to watch the bruised clouds over head, picking out shapes as if she were still ten years old. There a skeleton, there a ghost, there a dinosaur. There, a tree of silver, falling to pieces with the breeze. 

Quietly, she wonders what the taste of pomegranate and sunlight would be.


End file.
